


Breathless

by Pragnificent (PragmaticHominid)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: M/M, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-17
Updated: 2017-09-17
Packaged: 2018-12-26 07:17:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12054015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PragmaticHominid/pseuds/Pragnificent
Summary: Alana places the folder on the table between them, well within Will’s reach despite the shackles, but he makes no move to pick it up.“Is that the autopsy report?”Alana glances down at the file before looking back at him. “It is.”Will keeps his hands folded in front of him on the table. He does not reach for it.





	Breathless

**Author's Note:**

  * For [coloredink](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coloredink/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The House That Dripped Blood](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10067021) by [coloredink](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coloredink/pseuds/coloredink). 



Will looks up at Alana when she enters the interrogation room, but it is the manila folder that she is carrying that he tracks with his eyes as she approaches him and sits down on the other side of the table. 

She places the folder on the table between them, well within Will’s reach despite the shackles, but he makes no move to pick it up. 

“Will,” she says. “How are you?”

“Is that the autopsy report?”

Alana glances down at the folder before looking back at him. “It is.”

Will keeps his hands folded in front of him on the table. He does not reach for it.

“Why are you here, Alana?”

Alana studies him, and in her gaze he sees himself as he is to her; a disappointment. A ruined thing, and damned. If it was simply condemnation it would be easy enough to bear, but there is pity in her eyes, too. He feels it on his skin, sticky and unwelcomed.

She says, “I was hoping that you would tell me what happened.”

“You’re asking for me to tell you what it was like, being in hiding with Hannibal?”

Alana hesitates. “I want to know what happened,” she repeats. Then she says, “Can we start at the beginning? How did you escape the country?”

“Hannibal had everything planned. I helped him get back up to the house, and he showed me everything - the false passports, the information for half a dozen different bank accounts, the deed to the house in Buenos Aires. Slipping away was surprisingly uncomplicated.Everything was waiting when we got there. You’ve seen the pictures of the house, haven’t you?”

Alana nods. 

“The rooms flowed into one another like a chain of emotional associations, with few barriers in between. All open space and floor to ceiling windows. 

“You could pull back the curtains in the bedroom and lounge in the sun without ever having to get out of bed. Hannibal and I spent a lot of time together like that. Relaxing. Having conversations. Enjoying one another’s company.”  

“You shared a bed.” Will can see how much that worries her, and he can see the way she is struggling to keep the disgust from her face. 

Hannibal would have found it amusing, and his amusement would have bled over into Will to make him feel the same way, too. But Hannibal isn’t here, and Will feels himself becoming angry instead. 

“We shared everything. It was entirely chaste, if that’s what has you concerned.”

Will knows that it was. Some of the worry goes out of her, but a great deal remains. It is the question of consent that is weighing on her, among many other things, but Will finds that beneath his fury there is no part of him remaining that cares how she might judge him.

So he says, “Sometimes, I would touch him - for the comfort in it, though he never touched me back. During the nights it could become surprisingly chill very quickly, so sometimes I’d move in close and wrap my arms around him. I’d tell him that I was worried that he was cold, and that was part of the truth, but I wanted to leach some of his body heat for my own benefit as well. He knew this, of course, but he never complained. It didn’t bother him.”

He is remembering now, and as Alana fades from importance in the shadows of those memories he feels the smile growing across his lips, soft and fond. “I slept so well when he was close… I’d follow the steadiness of his breathing down into sleep. But when it hitched, when the rhythm changed or anything out of the ordinary happened… then I would wake up. I was with him as often as I could be - almost all the time - and when things were bad I always stayed close. He appreciated that.” 

“He was severely injured,” Alana says carefully. 

“Of course he was,” Will snaps. He knows that she is edging around something that she believes will upset him - something, he doesn’t doubt, that she read in the coroner's report - and her pity is to him so repulsive and so hideously presumptive that he can barely stand it. “I pushed him off a fucking cliff. Me. I did that to him. I couldn’t live with myself, but he was the one -”

His heart is like a snared bird, throwing itself fluttering against the cage of his ribs. Why is it still beating, when Hannibal’s has stopped?

“I thought that he’d be angry with me. You’ve seen him angry, Alana, haven’t you? It’s worse than being trapped under icy water, that seething rage, and especially when you can feel the hurt smoldering under it the feeling is exactly like having the breath pulled out of you. I thought that he would hate me, but he didn’t.” 

Will hears the wonder in his own voice. “He forgave me. Even after everything that I’d done to hurt him, he forgave me again.” 

Will looks down at his hands. His index finger had caught between two rocks and broken when they hit the water, and it hadn’t healed straight. He’d fallen all that way and the only permanent injury was that crooked finger. Hannibal’s body had shielded him from the worse - or else, Hannibal had shielded him with his body. 

Will never dared to ask if it had been deliberate. 

“So I cared for him. I made sure he was as comfortable as he could be, and whatever he asked for I gave to him. 

“I learned how to make broth, for when he was ill - when he couldn’t eat anything else. I got to be very good at it. 

“When I started, I’d just take about four pounds of meat and bones, add fresh carrots, celery, and onion, all chopped fine, and then add some parsley and rosemary and thyme, salt and pepper… Straight forward, you know? 

“But you know how he was. Extravagant tastes, even when he could hardly taste it… He insisted that I become more creative, try new recipes or invent my own. Bok choy, wolfberries, very specific varieties of tomatoes and peppers and mushrooms. 

“I’d simmer it all in a pot for four or six hours and strain out the solids with cheesecloth, and he could eat the resulting broth. Usually. If I helped him. He wasn’t ashamed to need the help, or if he was he hid it very well.”

There is no quaver in her voice when she asks, “What sort of meat?” but Will sees the dread. It’s not fear of learning something that she doesn’t want to know, but of facing up to what she has already come to understand. 

“He never put the knife in my hand, Alana,” Will tells her, and he does not drop his eyes as he says this because he is not ashamed. “He couldn’t have forced me, even if he’d desired to do so. I did everything that I did for myself, and for him, and because I wanted to.”

Alana wets her lips. “There was a time when I would never have believed that you could be a killer.”

“Yes,” Will says, and he tries to keep the cruelty from his voice when he adds, “But you thought that of Hannibal as well, didn’t you?”

He leans back as far in his chair as the chains will allow, and when he speaks his tone is expansive. “Nothing he was capable of was beyond me. We were one and the same. He was always with me, no matter where I went.

“And I enjoyed it. Every part, Alana - understand. I never wanted it to end; Hannibal said that it didn’t have to.”

“But it did end. You turned yourself in.”

“Yes,” Will says. He has to swallow before he can go on. “Because he died. 

“I knew that he was going soon. So did he. He’d talk to me about it. I hated it - the way he was still trying to force me face up to realities that I didn’t want to see, to accept what seemed utterly unacceptable and to twist myself into a shape that would be strong enough to somehow survive it. 

“He was doing his best to hang on, and he was doing it for me - because he knew how badly I needed him - but it cost him. His body was so broken… There was nothing that we could do to keep the muscles from atrophying or to prevent his bones from losing density. As often as he could handle it I made sure he stretched, but the ligaments in his limbs and his spine still tightened up a little more every day, and they drew his arms and legs in towards his center, forced the body into a curled, fetal shape.

“He was painful to look at, but I made myself look anyway. I wasn’t the one dying by inches, and the least I could do was look at what was happening until I could see him again, beneath all the ground he was losing, but sometimes I was like to choke on the guilt.

“He told me that he would… appreciate it if I ate him, after he was gone. It was important to him that he didn’t go to waste, but mostly he thought about it in terms of my Becoming - that it would be some sort of guarantor that I would keep moving forward when he was gone, that I wouldn’t give up. 

“I’d try to goad him into holding on a little longer, when he started talking like that. I’d say, ‘If you’d eat more maybe you wouldn’t leave such a miserable and unappealing carcass.’  

“That hurt him. And I wish that I hadn’t said it - but I was so desperate to force him to stay any way that I could. And he tried, because he was worried about me. He wanted to make sure that I understood this was just another step in my Becoming, that I had to go on and grow from this… That what I was now was so much bigger and brighter than he’d ever imagined, and he’d held nearly boundless aspirations for me from the start, but that this was only the beginning of my radiance…

“But he was wrong.” Will lifts his shackled hands, raising them to the limit of the chain. Then he lets them drop back to the table, helpless. “When he stopped breathing - when he wasn’t here with me anymore - the person that I’d been when we were together died too… that person couldn’t exist absent of him. I felt small and emptied out and frightened, and I couldn’t bring myself to… take the meat.   

“And there wasn’t any point in hiding any longer. I’m alone now. There’s nothing left for me to protect.”

He lets his head sag forward. The silence goes on for a long time, and when Alana says his name Will doesn’t look up. 

“Will…” she says again, and the hesitation in her voice tells him that she is afraid that what she has to say next will hurt him. “I’ve read the coroner's report, and they found that there was… extensive brain damage, sustained some months ago. They thought that it was likely caused by oxygen deprivation, but that the damage was such that he could not have regained consciousness… He was effectively brain dead.

“You were always alone. The rest of this… it’s delusions, Will, or else lies that you are telling yourself to avoid reality.”

It doesn’t bother him, what Alana is saying. He understands that she thinks he is insane, but that doesn’t worry him either.  

“You don’t see,” he says, and he speaks gently but with no great investment in being understood; she has never been equipped to understand him, any more than she could have understood Hannibal. “I’m not disputing that Hannibal was barely present in his body, but he was with me - in me, a part of me - right up until he wasn’t. He spoke to me and his voice was as real as yours, Alana, even if it reverberated from inside the walls of my skull.

“I don’t know where he went. I don’t - I don’t understand if he still exists… it’s difficult for me to believe that he could. But I know what I know, and I know that he was here, with me, for as long as he was breathing, and when he died I felt him go out and away from me.”

He hesitates, his thoughts a jumble of regrets. What if he had taken the meat, as Hannibal wanted? What if he had simply killed himself when Hannibal died? Would they be closer to one another now if he had?

Will wishes that he was dead, too. He knows that for the things that he has done he deserves to be dead as much as Hannibal ever did, and that he deserves to die for what he did to Hannibal. 

Maybe, in some other world, he is already dead. Maybe there is some world in which he never tipped Hannibal and himself over the edge of the cliff. But this world is all he has, and there is nothing left in it for him except the gnawing loneliness and bottomless guilt.

“There’s nothing that file can tell me that I don’t already know. Take it with you when you leave, please,” he tells Alana, and his voice is lifeless and dull. 

He turns his head away from her, and refuses to speak any further.  


End file.
